Rebecca

“I am convinced that I could live my whole life as a monk, despite the sweet animal carnality with which I am endowed, and which I have always managed to summon up.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons

“This is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you.”
― Adrienne Rich

“She wanted to go to school with him. She wanted to don a gang jacket and sit in the back of the classroom with a bat so that everyone understood what would happen to them if they messed with her kid. She wanted to go in and give a speech she'd actually rehearsed over and over in her head. The rest of you may be gender-conforming children, she'd say, but you're not nearly as smart, funny, or interesting as Claude, so you tell me which is better: awesome, dynamic boy in a skirt, or tiresome, whiney child with a runny nose who has nothing to offer but compliance.”
― Laurie Frankel, This Is How It Always Is

“Every hero needs to venture into the Belly of the Beast. It’s essential to be devoured at least once by the monster. The hero never begins as a hero. He becomes a hero, and that entails the annihilation of his own, unheroic, former self. The hero always undergoes a metamorphosis, from ordinary to extraordinary. The hero, like the snake, sheds its old skin and takes on a new form. To change, you must enter a sacred space, a transformational space. Nothing ever changes in the ordinary space. The familiar world keeps you the same. It has no alchemical power. If you are confined in the same old world, you remain the same old person. You must cross the threshold into the New World.”
― David Sinclair, The Church of the Serpent: The Philosophy of the Snake and Attaining Transcendent Knowledge